PITTSBURGH — For generations, Pittsburgh residents have worked in steel mills, been Steelers fans or ridden the roller coasters at Kennywood amusement park, where they could get a bird’s-eye view of the massive Edgar Thomson Works, the region’s last blast furnace.
Now Steeltown is USA’s most legendary steel company, US steelis set to be acquired by Japanese steelmaker Nippon Steel Corp. in a deal that is creating a political storm in America’s industrial heartland during an election year.
The sale comes amid renewed political support for rebuilding America’s manufacturing sector and amid a presidential campaign in which the politically dynamic Pittsburgh region is a destination for President Joe Bidenformer president Donald Trump and their deputies.
The deal follows a long series of protectionist measures. US rates that analysts say has helped revive the domestic steel sector. And it’s stirring up complicated feelings in a region where steel is largely a thing of the past as people, especially those over 50, watch factories close and their Rust Belt towns languish.
“The fear is that these jobs were once gone, and the fear is that these jobs could disappear again,” said Mike Mikus, a Pittsburgh-based Democratic campaign consultant whose grandfather lost his job in the steel mill 40 years ago.
US Steel is no longer a major steelmaker in an industry dominated by the Chinese. But its workers still wield political influence in what some see as a larger symbolic fight to save what remains of manufacturing in the United States.
With the United Steelworkers opposing the deal, Biden – a Democrat who has made his support for organized labor explicit and has won the union’s backing – has all but vowed to block the sale of US Steel, saying in an April meeting with steelworkers in Pittsburgh that the company must “remain all-American.”
Trump, a Republican who opposed unionization efforts as president but describes himself as pro-labor, has said he would block it “immediately.”
The Biden White House has indicated that the secret Commission on Foreign Investment in the United States will review the transaction for national security concerns. The committee can recommend that the president block a transaction, and federal law gives the president that power.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department is investigating whether the product complies with antitrust laws, and the steelworkers’ union has filed a complaint.
In a rare burst of bipartisan unity, the sale has drawn opposition from Democratic Senators Bob Casey and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and Sherrod Brown of Ohio, and from Republican Senators J.D. Vance of Ohio, Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri, on both economic and national security grounds.
Nippon Steel has the deal planned close later this year.
US Steel was once the world’s largest company and was the world’s 27th-largest steel producer in 2023, according to figures from the World Steel Association. It reported net income of just under $900 million on revenue of $16 billion last year.
The deal includes all of U.S. Steel’s ore mining, coking, steelmaking and processing plants nationwide, including the Edgar Thomson Works, which overlooks the Monongahela River just south of Pittsburgh and is still producing steel plates 150 years after it was built. U.S. Steel employs 3,000 people at its four major Pennsylvania plants, including the Edgar Thomson and the nation’s largest coking plant in nearby Clairton.
Nippon Steel, which is set to become the world’s fourth-largest steel producer in 2023, according to association figures, and US Steel are now launching a broad public relations campaign to promote the sale.
Their ads are appearing on social media, TV screens and billboards. The companies promise to protect jobs, move Nippon Steel’s U.S. headquarters from Houston to Pittsburgh and invest in the aging factories in the Pittsburgh area to make them cleaner and more efficient.
Flyers landing in Pittsburgh mailboxes tout the “future of American steel” and urge residents to contact their elected officials to support the companies’ “partnership.”
And, they say, “US Steel remains US Steel.”
Meanwhile, Pittsburgh has become a completely different city.
It is no longer a destination for new steel investment. The 20 or so miles (32 kilometers) of contiguous iron and steel mills of downtown Pittsburgh and the Monongahela River that helped industrialize the U.S. and fight its wars are gone.
Today, Pittsburgh is seen as an “eds and meds” city, where universities and hospitals are the largest employers.
Allegheny County, which surrounds Pittsburgh, has just begun to grow again after decades of population decline. Some of the city’s neighborhoods have emerged from long struggles and are thriving, and a younger generation is drawn to the city’s growing high-tech industry.
Younger residents or transplants don’t necessarily want steelworkers to lose their jobs, but they also care about the environment. Local elections are increasingly bringing out rebellious progressives who have negative views of fossil fuels and the heavy industries — like the U.S. Steel plants — that use them.
Edith Abeyta, an artist originally from California who lives near Edgar Thomson Works, has an air monitor in her home to check the air quality daily.
To her, Edgar Thomson Works is a thorn in her side and a threat to her health.
“Not every place you go smells like rotten eggs or burning metal or you see big plumes of red smoke or black smoke or flares burning all night,” Abeyta said. “Not everyone lives with that.”
Steelworkers have changed too.
The union still supports Democrats, but rank-and-file union members like the steelworkers are no longer seen as a cornerstone of the Democratic Party coalition, partly because of the shrinking number of unions but also because of a surge in defectors. In 2016, Trump became the first Republican to win the Rust Belt states of Michigan and Pennsylvania since 1988.
Christopher Briem, an economist at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Social and Urban Research, estimated that there are 5,000 steel mill jobs in the region, a small percentage of the number of mill jobs when steel production there was at its peak. He estimates that competitive steel production in the region peaked in the 1920s, before technological advances made the region’s metallurgical coal obsolete for steelmaking and led to electric arc furnaces that don’t require coal.
While Pittsburgh has overcome the collapse of the steel industry, some of its smaller cities have not.
“And that’s what made people so concerned, the fact that we’ve been through this before and it’s changed the region and destroyed people’s lives,” said August Carlino, president and CEO of the Homestead-based Rivers of Steel Heritage Corporation.
Tony Buba, a filmmaker who lives near the Edgar Thomson plant and whose father worked in a steel mill for 44 years, sees a misplaced nostalgia surrounding the steel industry in Pittsburgh.
Factory jobs were dangerous work that didn’t pay decent wages until shortly before the collapse of the steel industry in the early 1980s, he said. “Sirens would go off if someone got hurt, and mother would pray,” he said.
Regardless of who owns it, Buba expects the steel mills in Pittsburgh to be gone within 30 or 40 years, and political support will be short-lived.
“It will be interesting to see how many people oppose the sale after the elections,” Buba said.
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Follow Marc Levy on twitter.com/timelywriter.
